Two Modes of Creativity

Abstract. As electronic
media become more widespread and less of a novelty, it is
becoming an acute task to explore the contrasts between printed
and electronic media. This article argues that the electronic
revolution and the multiethnic one are two sides of the same
coin: that both create ‘disorderly’ conditions that stimulate
certain forms of thought and creativity, which differ markedly
from those associated with the linear prose narrative. Using
Salman Rushdie's and V. S. Naipaul's books as examples, the
author also compares Marshall McLuhan's and Claude Lévi-Strauss's
proposals of similar contrasts. At the end, the dichotomy is
deemed to have accomplished its task, and it is accordingly
replaced with a more fine-grained classification.

I

In the famous opening passage of The Satanic Verses,
where Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta fall out of Air
India's London-bound flight 420, later to be fished miraculously
out of the Channel, Gibreel improvises an English translation of
an old Hindi film song: ‘O, my shoes are Japanese [...] These
trousers English, if you please. On my head, red Russian hat; my
heart's Indian for all that’ [38, p.5].* In a later essay explaining the mission of his
instantly controversial novel – burned in Bradford, leading to a
fatwa in Tehran, creating a decade-long global stir – Rushdie
offers his view of creativity, contrasting it with the cultural
purism and fear of contamination he associates with the enemies
of The Satanic Verses:

[The book] rejoices in mongrelization and fears the
absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a
bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great
possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have
tried to embrace it. [39, p.394]

This view of ‘newness’ and creativity in general is congruent
with a model of creativity associated with the new media. What
follows amounts to a tentative exploration of the correspondence
between postcolonial hybridity and the structures of meaning
typically developed through the new media, indicating that both
tendencies represent a similar break with a traditional view of
creativity – in a word, that the multi-ethnic revolution and the
electronic one are two sides of the same coin.

II

There is little doubt that the networked world is
characterised by tensions that differ from those typical of the
old, hierarchical world. They have been explored by many social
theorists in recent years, from Baudrillard to Urry, and instead
of embarking on a lengthy discussion here, I will summarise,
without any further ado, some of the contrasts that may be
developed in an investigation of the cultural dimensions of the
electronic revolution. (For more, see Eriksen's
Tyranny of the Moment [7].) The table
is inspired by those respectable thinkers who bravely defended
‘great divide’ theories of cultural change and
simplistic dichotomies in the face of severe (and often
reasonable) accusations of reductionism, perhaps most notably
Jack Goody [9] and Marshall McLuhan [21].

A word on simplistic dichotomies may be called for here: They
do not purport to describe the world, but merely to serve as
cognitive devices making it possible to discern tendencies. The
world as such is a much messier and more complex place than such
clear-cut divisions may imply if they are taken at face
value.

Now, assuming that cultural globalisation actually does take
place – and it can easily be shown that it does, at least
in the sense of intensified and accelerated contact across
geographical boundaries, mediated by information technology
– one may begin by asking naïvely, as many do, whether
these processes lead to increased creativity or to a general
‘flattening.’ Both views have their
defenders. According to a classic ‘left wing’
attitude, inspired by the left-Hegelian Frankfurt school and/or
by Marxism, globalisation chiefly leads to increased
standardisation and commercialisation in the culture industry,
since profit-seeking capital is the driving force in the
globalising processes. Many anthropologists, influenced by
Romantic ideals (whether Marxist or not), subscribe to this view
– from Malinowski [20] lamenting the
impact of cultural contact on the Trobriands, via
Lévi-Strauss's elegy for the small and isolated peoples in
Tristes Tropiques [17], to Geertz's
slightly self-ironic essay on globalisation [8]
where, with an audible sigh, he concedes that ‘the good
old days’ of radical cultural difference are gone.

A very different perspective is achieved if, rather than
seeing globalisation as an aspect of capital accumulation or as
an euphemism for cultural imperialism, one regards it as a
two-way process entailing a democratisation of symbolic power
whereby postcolonial scholars, authors and artists are enabled
to define and invent the world, on a par with the intellectuals
of the metropolitan centres. While some see cultural collapse,
lowest common denominators and blatant commercialisation in the
contemporary encounters between different symbolic universes,
others see creative confrontation, stimulating exchanges and
innovative glocalisation [34]. (See
also Ulf Hannerz [12].) While some react to
globalisation's flood of signs by building dikes (or, perhaps,
by trying to drink the entire floodwave), others learn to
swim. This may be an apt description of reactions to
multiculturalism as well as to the new electronic media.

Rushdie is an emblematic spokesman for the latter, optimistic
position. Perhaps more than any other major novelist, he
celebrates the hybridisation and cultural mixing caused by
international migration, global flows of ideas and the spreading
of a modern worldview entailing a willingness to accept
cultural change and a suspicious ambivalence towards tradition
and ascribed identities.

Rushdie's position as a promoter of hybridity and the
vitality of the cultural crossroads (or
‘switchboards,’ to use one of Ulf Hannerz's terms)
should be clear enough, and it has its academic parallel both in
a plethora of cultural studies publications, in a lot of
political theory, and in a few grounded ethnographies, such as
that of Archetti [2]). A more complex, and in
some respect opposite position is represented in one of his
older contemporaries, an author who is himself placed in a
similar ambivalent, hybrid cultural situation, namely
V. S. Naipaul. Whereas Rushdie has an Indian Muslim background,
but has spent most of his life in Britain, Naipaul is an
‘East Indian from the West Indies’ – an Indian
from Trinidad, who emigrated to London in his late teens, a
couple of years after the Second World War, and who would later
return to Trinidad only very rarely (chiefly to visit his
mother). Both Rushdie and Naipaul are themselves located
between distinctive cultural traditions, and their
respective writings are deeply informed by their ambiguous
identities and ambivalent positionings. About Rushdie it may be
said that he spends his entire life on board a plane between
London and Bombay (such as Air India's Flight 420), never being
able to – or wishing to – land. His novels, with the
possible exception of his first, Grimus (1975) [35]) and his last, Fury (2001) [42]), are hybrid products in several ways: The
language is replete with original neologisms, puns, Indian
English and direct adaptations from Hindi/Urdu. The narrator's
perspective in the books wavers between an insider's and an
outsider's view. The books moreover take place chiefly in the
Indian subcontinent; this is clearly the case with
Midnight's Children (1981) [36],
Shame (1983) [37] and The Moor's
Last Sigh (1995) [40], while The
Satanic Verses (1988) [38] and The
Ground Beneath her Feet (1999) [41] are
multilocal with India as a centre of gravity. Rushdie's
subcontinental people, places and environments are presented
both in a matter-of-fact way as if the readers were initiates,
and in a sometimes exaggerated exoticising way, creating a
Verfremdung effect to his non-Indian readers (and
considerable irritation in India). Rushdie has turned his
betwixt-and-between condition of exile into a blessing
(notwithstanding the exhausting fatwa), which has given
birth to a unique literary voice with respect to both language,
form and content, by assimilating and mixing material of diverse
origins.

Turning to Naipaul, he is simultaneously a less flashy author
and a less optimistic person than Rushdie. In a recent
interview, he admitted disliking the term ‘exile,’
seeing the currently widespread use of the word as imposing an
idea of freedom of choice upon a condition, that is
displacement, which is rarely chosen, and which can be tragic or
at the very least deadly serious to millions of people. To
Naipaul, his lifelong enforced uprootedness appears to have been
more of a personal trauma than a source of positive
liberation. He regards the Trinidad of his childhood as an
absurd society, where Africans and Indians were moved by force
or persuasion to work on the sugar plantations, torn away from
their homes, their traditions and their cultural authenticity,
fooled into believing they were a kind of Briton through
colonial schooling, and then forced to reinvent themselves
almost on an everyday basis [25; 30]. His early novels, from The Mystic
Masseur (1957) [23] to A House for Mr
Biswas (1961) [24], sharply satirise what
the author sees as Trinidadian cultural promiscuity; the
‘carnival mentality’ which encourages people to mix,
in noisy and boisterous ways, cultural stuff one has done
nothing to deserve, and then creating an identity which consists
of shiny surfaces without the slightest intimation of depth or
inner consistency. Trinidadians, according to Naipaul, play
themselves. In The Middle Passage (1963) [25], he described a scene outside of a cinema in
Port-of-Spain after a screening of Casablanca. All the
men leaving the cinema, according to Naipaul, had immediately
adopted exactly the same way of walking as Humphrey
Bogart. Comic effects of this kind are abundant in Naipaul's
early work. In 1962, the uprooted, Anglicised Hindu from
Trinidad – disillusioned with Britain, despising the
Caribbean – travelled in India in a final attempt to find
a site for cultural belonging, and it was a journey which
resulted in a travelogue aptly entitled An Area of
Darkness (1964) [26]; he would later
describe the year in India as a journey which split his life
into two parts. Shocked by India, alienated by England, aloof
from the Caribbean, Naipaul became a writer trading in torn
identities. Several of his mature, largely tragic novels, from
The Mimic Men (1967) [27] and In
a Free State (1971) [28] to The
Enigma of Arrival (1987) [30] and
Half a Life (2001) [33], are about
men (and a few women) who try to be something that they are not,
usually because they can see no alternative. It is the dark side
of Rushdie's brave new world.

The longing for solidity, roots, continuity and belonging is
a recurrent theme throughout Naipaul's œuvre, but
he does not like modern attempts to mime cultural
authenticity. He is at his most scathing when he writes about
politicised Hinduism and non-Arab Asian Muslims – converts, he
calls the latter, although they strictly speaking have been
Muslims their entire lives and live in countries where Islam was
introduced centuries ago. However, it can also be said that the
tragic grandeur of Naipaul's best books confirm an assumption,
which he himself might reject, that exile and cultural hybridity
are creative forces. His tragic worldview may be caused by his
reading a new territory with an old map, while simultaneously
realising that the alternative to his lifelong ambivalence is
not a traditional, secure identity, but a fundamentalist
identity of the kind that appears precisely when one tries to
enforce an old map onto a new territory.

There are two obvious analytical approaches to the kind of
creativity which is expressed in two widely different ways in
Rushdie and Naipaul. First, it has often been said that it is
only by going abroad that one can hope to know (in the sense of
connaître, kennen) one's own country. Only
when one has established a certain distance from a phenomenon is
one able to see it clearly. It may be that this explains why
nationalism often has been developed among migrants or people
who are otherwise marginal to their own culture, such as those
Benedict Anderson calls ‘creole pioneers’ [1] – Napoleon was a Corsican; African
nationalisms under colonialism were carved out by students in
London and Paris; Vladimir Zhirinovsky has a Jewish background;
and so on. Nostalgia and longing stimulate creative
activity.

Secondly, especially Rushdie's writings and views of
‘newness’ recalls eighteenth-century philosophical
discourse on novelty and innovation. In A Treatise of Human
Nature, David Hume claims, against Descartes and the
rationalists, that the human mind is unable to create anything
new on its own accord (what Kant would later call synthetic a
priori knowledge), but is limited to combining and comparing
sense impressions [14]. New concepts arise,
according to Hume, through new combinations of existing ideas
and sense impressions, and he mentions millenarian visions of
the New Jerusalem as a typical example. According to such a
conceptualisation of creativity, the present age would be an era
of unprecedented creativity, for never before has such a large
proportion of humanity been subjected to a comparable
bombardement of sense impressions.

A generation after Hume, the beginnings of what might be seen
as the first cult of creativity in western cultural history
began, namely Romanticism. Romantic philosophers and artists in
the German language area, and to a lesser extent elsewhere in
Europe, placed great emphasis on the inherent creativity of the
unique individual, on inspiration (divine or otherwise) as the
foundation for creativity; and also emphasised wholeness and
coherence as criteria for beauty and truth. When William Blake
towards the end of the eighteenth century expressed his vision
to see ‘the world in a grain of sand’ [4, 490], he gave words to a widespread longing in
his time: to recreate the lost unity of the universe, for both
modern science and technological innovations seemed to make the
world a colder and more insensitive place, then as now. A
classic Romantic view of creativity might imply a negative
judgement of the general cacophony and fragmentation of our
era. If creativity presupposes coherence, then the information
age is not a particularly creative era.

Related views on artistic creativity (and on cultural
authenticity) were widespread throughout the twentieth
century. In the interwar years, it was common among
intellectuals in the German-speaking area to distinguish between
Kultur and Zivilisation. Civilisation was
universal, global and shallow; culture was particular, local and
deep. The Jews, it was often said, could appropriate the
civilisation of the Germans, but not their culture. Since each
authentic culture is rooted in a place, a language and a
life-world of experience, it can be translated only with
difficulty, both literally and metaphorically. When Goethe's
relationship to his erstwhile friend Herder (perhaps the first
modern Romantic) cooled, it was in part because he felt that
Herder's Sturm und Drang movement had insular
tendencies – it was after all Goethe who said that
‘he who knows no foreign language knows nothing about his
own’ [10].

A less spectacular, but related resistance to creolisation
and globalisation is found in contemporary discourse on
food. Some time in the early 1990s, a group of European chefs
met in Brussels to discuss the future of the European cuisines
[6]. In their view, regional and national
cuisines were threatened by European integration, where
distinctive food traditions were mixed and juxtaposed in
ahistorical and disrespectful ways; the result was, in their
view, a series of minor culinary catastrophes, which also
threatened regional identities. According to this kind of logic
(coherence is beauty; rootedness is truth), one might be tempted
to read Rushdie's work as the postmodern food of literature, so
to speak. In a word: Civilisation is easily translatable, it
travels easily and is couched in a language that makes it easy
to appropriate; culture, on the other hand, is rooted, heavy and
demanding. Civilisation is superficial, while culture is
deep. It is for this reason – following this way of
thinking – that international bestsellers in the book
industry are so often literary lightweights, the McDonald's and
Disneylands of the literary world; while works of great quality
often have difficulties in being accepted and understood outside
of their local or national setting.

It might be added that many thinkers who clearly belong to
the Enlightenment rather than the Romantic tradition react
negatively against cultural creolisation as it comes to be
expressed in the information society. For example, in his book
on television, Pierre Bourdieu attacks the peculiar form of
fast thinking that seems to thrive in the fast and
fragmented world of multi-channel television [3], while Paul Virilio has devoted several of his
recent writings to warnings against the societal and cultural
effects of uncontrolled acceleration in communications
technology [44; 45].

A question that might be raised here, naïvely, could simply
be this: Do speed, migration, creolisation and uprootedness
stimulate cultural creativity, or do they on the contrary have
paralysing, commercialising and flattening effects? (Rushdie
himself is not alien to this danger. For example, he uses the
neologism Coca-Colonization to that effect in The
Satanic Verses [38]. Haahr [11] and Eriksen [7] also address
this question through separate discussions of acceleration in
the era of information technology.) Do we see an emergent world,
then, where nobody has a cultural mother tongue, but everybody
picks and chooses at random from the global supermarket of
signs, like Naipaul's eclectic Trinidadians; where the
imperative to choose precludes true commitment, and where the
speed of transmission and turnover rates are so high anyway that
there is no room for anything profound or demanding in the
markets of ‘creative products?’ Now, whatever Adorno
might have said, there is no straightforward answer to this kind
of question, and I therefore proceed to raising it in a
different way.

III

The cultural changes marking the transition from industrial
society to information society – perhaps also the transition
from the age of nation-states to a global/glocal age – may be
described, by analogy, through the contrast between the logic of
the book and the logic of hypertext. The book is linear,
sequential and authoritarian. It offers direction, coherence and
progression. In both works of fiction and of non-fiction, an
inner relation between chapters is assumed; they should be
developed in a cumulative way. A plot in a typical novel should
have a beginning, a middle and an end, and the substance of most
non-fiction books is wrapped in an introduction and an end (or
conclusion) which creates the illusion of the book as a
self-sustaining universe, a unity sufficient unto itself. The
logic of the book is the logic of the Greek miracle, of
Christian eschatology and of industrial engineering. Reading has
its ends. One may rarely jump back and forth in a novel or
textbook; in order to understand it, one has to follow the
linear structure laid out by the author – from page 1
onwards.

Hyperlinked information on the World Wide Web and elsewhere
follows a different logic. All web pages are organised
horizontally. They are not placed in a particular order deemed
necessary, and they presuppose that an active user filters
information and finds his or her own paths through the
labyrinth. There are scarcely two persons who have exactly the
same list of sites under Netscape's ‘Bookmarks’
menu. Although there are authors who have made entire books
available on the Web, this is far from the typical way in which
the medium is used. Just as the technology and materiality of
the book encourages long, continuous, cumulative reasoning, the
Web encourages short texts hyperlinked in a decentralised and
networked way with an infinite number of other short texts (in
this it resembles the logic of modernist poetry). On the Web,
everything is page 1. Creating a coherent whole of selected web
pages presupposes a creative process of the Rushdie/Hume
kind.

In a sense, the WWW is to multi-channel television what the
standard prose book is to single-channel television. The old
national monopolies or semi-monopolies of broadcasting, which
dominated television in most of the world until the early 1980s,
were able to broadcast slow, cumulative, linear programmes,
knowing that the viewers had little choice but to stay
tuned. Today's TV channels have to compose their programmes on
the basis of the knowledge that viewers sit impatiently with
their remote control on the armrest, ready to switch channels at
the first indication of boredom and inertia. While the author of
a book takes the reader by the hand, patiently leading her from
one chapter to the next, the Web author can only hope to catch
the reader's attention for a few fleeting moments, and will
normally restrict himself to offering a fragment, a single
jigsaw piece; and the other pieces are located in different
places to different readers/surfers.

It is common to see this development as a history of decay
and deterioration. The slick surfaces, the fast thinkers and the
cheap and catchy, immediately understandable phenomena take
over. It is said the WWW and contemporary television stand still
at an enormous speed – there is a lot of action, but no
real development. This widespread pessimistic view deserves
critical attention: as several of the contributors to the
previous issues of Crossings point out in
different ways, new and different does not necessarily mean
inferior, although this is frequently the way it is seen.

In his visionary books on technology and society written in
the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan delved into the effects of
television on culture and individual perception. He described
writing, expressed through the ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’
– books and print – as a fragmenting medium which
reduced the multiplicities of the world to black signs on a
white background. Literacy and printing, according to McLuhan,
replaced ‘an ear with an eye’ [21]. The faculty of seeing became privileged
among the five senses, and all information deemed relevant could
be obtained through the eyes. The other senses became
dormant. McLuhan, moreover, regarded writing as a cognitive
prison; it enforced a linear and logical structure upon thought,
and led to a loss of wholeness and coherence. By contrast, he
saw television as liberating since it communicated to several
senses simultaneously, in a richer and more complete way than
writing was able to do. In later writings, McLuhan spoke of the
transition from writing to multimedia (TV) as a liberation from
the total dominance of the left brain hemisphere (logical,
analytical), giving the right brain hemisphere (holistic,
synthesising, intuitive) its due. When McLuhan somewhere writes
cryptically about the ‘orientalization of the
Occident,’ he clearly has such a change in mind.

Some of McLuhan's best-known books, such as the provocative
Understanding Media [21], published
in 1964, and the 1967 pop-art collage The Medium is the
Massage [22], not only promote, but
illustrate his thinking. His writing comprises a mixture of
academic prose, journalism, punning and advertising-like
slogans, with extensive use of literary effects such as
hyperbole and metaphor. The books may be read sideways,
backwards and forwards. The connections between the chapters are
often unclear, and the chapters do not follow each other in
strict linear sequences. These texts could easily be adapted to
the hypertext format.

Around the same time that McLuhan wrote Understanding
Media, Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote La pensée
sauvage [18], a book about thinking and
classification which strove to make sense of totemic thought in
traditional societies. The first chapter of Lévi-Strauss's
great book is nevertheless strongly reminiscent of McLuhan's
thoughts. This is where he introduces the famous distinction
between the bricoleur and the ingenieur. The
contrast refers to two styles of thought; the former
characterises nonliterate societies, while the latter dominates
in our kind of society. What the bricoleur is up to when he
creates something new amounts to – well,
bricolage – restructuring and reshuffling
pre-existing materials, as my brother did back in the 1970s when
he built a light organ from a defective dishwasher. The
engineer, by contrast, works on the basis of the abstract
technology of writing and numbers, and thus creates his ideas
and objects with the aid of logic, mathematics and other
abstractions.

The engineer works on abstractions with a concrete potential,
while the bricoleur abstracts from the concrete (as in the title
of the chapter ‘The science of the concrete,’
‘La science du concret’). The bricoleur works in an
associative, poetical, metaphorical-metonymical way; the
engineer works in a sequential, unambiguous and analytical
way. Towards the end of the chapter, Lévi-Strauss remarks that a
manner of thinking akin to bricolage can still be identified in
the societies based on writing, but only in the world of art,
which is located ‘half-way between scientific knowledge
and mythical or magical thought’ – he mentions
poetry and music as two typical expressions.

The engineer splits, the bricoleur unites. The engineer
represents an analytical logic, while the bricoleur represents a
synthetic logic. Coherence is poised against fragments,
mythical, reversible time against linear, irreversible time;
tropes against literal speech.

The similarities between these arguments from McLuhan and
Lévi-Strauss are striking, but whereas Lévi-Strauss develops a
contrast between nonliterate and literate societies, it may seem
as if McLuhan introduces a contrast between literate and
post-literate societies. Without drawing the parallel too far,
it may perhaps be said that McLuhan predicts the return of the
bricoleur in the age of television.*** Today, many of McLuhan's points are seen as
surprisingly relevant for the Internet, and the influential
Californian magazine WIRED virtually made him
their patron saint in the mid-1990s. Although the Web is still
mainly a medium based on writing, it is liberated from most of
the constraints of the book. The book is closed; the web is
open.

Against this background, it may not be entirely irrelevant
to point out that surveys among Scandinavian adolescents in the
1990s have repeatedly indicated that many of them would rather
work in a recording studio (where they might get the opportunity
to produce nonlinear, rhythmic, repetitive dance music) than
enrolling at, say, an engineering college. In all western
countries, the interest in engineering as a career has been
declining since the 1960s. It may seem, then, that young people
prefer being postmodern bricoleurs to being modern
engineers. Whatever the case may be, McLuhan heralds a time
dominated by a form of creativity liberated by the crutches of
science and the rails of logic, where the creative powers of
humanity are better depicted as mindmaps than as a syllogism;
where horizontal, associative connections replace vertical,
hierarchical and logical ones.

Lévi-Strauss says that the universe of the bricoleur or
mythical thinker is limited, while the world of the engineer or
scientific thinker is open and, in principle,
unlimited. ‘The peculiar characteristic of mythical
thought,’ he writes, ‘consists in expressing oneself
through a repertoire which is heterogenous and also, even if it
may be large, limited.’ He adds that considerable creative
originality may emerge from such a limited repertoire:
‘Like bricolage at the technical level, mythical thinking
may, at the intellectual level, achieve unpredicted and
brilliant results’ [18].

The reader will have noted the parallel between the
creativity of the bricoleur, as Lévi-Strauss describes it, and
Hume's view of novelty. Yet it may seem far-fetched to ascribe
bricolage qualities to the contemporary era. For is not one of
the defining traits of the information age precisely the fact of
unlimited access to information; an infinite, open universe
which in no way may be compared to the environment of Amazonian
tribes? Perhaps, but no matter how many web pages there are on
the WWW, the number of pages accessed by each user, and even the
total number of pages, is finite. Can one not say that both web
designers and web users create newness by making new links
between information which is already there? And can one not
similarly say that the remote control operator consciously or
unconsciously creates his or her own totality, or jigsaw, by
producing his or her own collage of images and ‘shows’ by
switching between channels? The universe of television is
doubtless limited and finite even if one were blessed with a
couple of hundred digital channels, and to the extent that the
viewer creates something him- or herself, the act of creation is
more closely related to the horizontal, intuitive style of the
bricoleur than to the goal-rational, linear style of the
engineer.

Television, food and the Internet have been
mentioned. Another field in contemporary ‘creolised’
culture which seems to satisfy the requirements of bricolage
(admittedly in a looser sense than intended by
Lévi-Strauss) is rhythmic popular music. As the composer,
musician and producer Brian Eno remarks in his autobiography
A Year with Swollen Appendices [5], it
seemed possible to distinguish between historical trends and
developments in popular music up to the early 1990s. Glam, punk,
heavy metal and reggae came from somewhere, had their distinct
waxing and waning, and were replaced by other trends. In more
recent years, Eno claims, nothing significant has happened apart
from recombinations of existing elements and recurring retro
movements and waves of nostalgia. Explicitly hybrid forms such
as world music are the most obvious examples, but the tendency
to recycle and remix is obvious in pop, rock and electronic
dance music as well. The situation has been described as that of
a time warp, where all postwar trends coexist and intermingle in
new ways, but where there is no sense of development or
direction [7]. At the same time as the
bestselling popular artists remain people like Bob Dylan and
Phil Collins (who have been active on the circuit for thirty to
forty years), the most popular dance music among young people is
nonlinear, rhythmic and repetitive, recalling the temporal
structures of African drumming or Javanese gamelan music rather
than the linear time structures of, say, Beethoven or Led
Zeppelin. The Jamaican music form dub, which has
mutated and spread all over the world, is an explicit form of
recycling, where existing material is manipulated in the
recording studio. As an aside, let me add that the term
intertextuality has been one of the most common trade
words in literary theory since the 1980s; a word which refers to
the relationship between ‘new’ texts and older
texts. Radical theorists may accordingly suggest that everything
has been written before; what remains to do for the creative
artist is, as it were, to combine existing texts in new
ways. Critics would say that this is exactly what an author such
as Salman Rushdie does, and that the ‘seething
cauldrons’ of cosmopolitan, culturally hybrid cities
produce little of lasting artistic value, but a fast-moving,
neverending string of reconfigurations and meta-commentaries,
adding little or nothing to existing works of art.

* * *

It may be possible to establish a reasonably convincing set
of dichotomies on the basis of the foregoing discussion,
beginning by contrasting structure and process, and then
establish a list of characteristic traits under each heading. On
the one hand we have bricolage and McLuhan's holistic
communication, cultural cosmopolitans or creoles, Rushdie's
mixed universe, the World Wide Web, the universalism of the
concept of civilisation and ambivalence. On the other hand, we
have linear, causal thought, the ideas from Romanticism about
organic growth and development, the sequential structure of the
book, the particularism of the concept of culture and the
counterreactions of fundamentalism. In my view, this kind of
dichotomy – fundamentalism versus ambivalence, closure versus
openness – can be helpful in an attempt to understand culture
and politics in our era. Yet it is easy to see that dichotomous
thought of this kind is simplistic and ultimately
inadequate. For it is easy to identify particularistic, ‘locally
delineated’ expressions of WWW bricolage on the Net,
and some of the most universalistic literature that has been
written, is grounded in local worlds. Dickens and Dostoyevsky!
Cosmopolitan uprootedness, moreover, can lead to a strong,
excluding (and indeed fundamentalist) sense of identity, and
close-knit local Gemeinschaften may turn out to be both
open and generous to the outside world. Thus it may seem that
any intention I might have had about establishing some useful
contrasts, in order to make sense of a networked, fluid,
creolised, chaotic landscape, collapses.

The solution may consist in distinguishing between two
levels. Regarding thought and communication, the distinction
between the linear, hierarchical and the nonlinear, horizontal
seems necessary. Regarding aspects of social and cultural
identification, the relationship between purity/closure and
impurity/openness is similarly important. The two levels may be
articulated in different ways. Each of the four alternatives,
moreover, creates a space for a peculiar form of creativity. The
main form of industrial society, thus, was the combination
linearity/openness connected to an either/or: Movement and
boundaries. The most important form of information society is
the combination nonlinearity/openness connected to a both-and:
Movement and openness. As the Catholic McLuhan might have
expressed it: We have left monotheism, and have entered the era
of intellectual Hinduism.

Acknowledgements

The author is indebted to Crossings' referees for
many useful criticisms on the first draft.

Notes

The reference is to Raj Kapoor's 1955 film Shri
420, ‘Mr. 420.’ [16] In
India, the number 420 suggests corruption and vice. The lyrics
to the first verse of the song ‘Mera joota hai
japaani’ are: ‘Mera joota hai Japani/Ye pataloon
hai inglistani/Sar pe lal topi roosi/Par bhi dil hai
hindustani,’ that is, ‘My shoes are Japanese/ And
the trousers are English/ The cap on my head is Russian/ But
my heart is Indian.’ Although there is probably no
direct connection, the song inevitably recalls Ibsen's
Peer Gynt, who, in response to Monsieur Ballon's
question, ‘But you are Norwegian?’, exclaims:
‘Of birth – yes! But of character a citizen of
the world’ [15] – before
moving on to a list references indicating his composite
identity, ranging from German books, French waistcoats and
esprit and English common sense to Italian dolce
far'niente and Swedish steel!

It is unlikely that Lévi-Strauss and McLuhan were aware of
each other at the time. However, the general ideas on literacy
and illiteracy that they drew on were readily available in
books and journals – although Lévi-Strauss would
probably deny their influence on his thought. In Jack Goody's
The Domestication of the Savage Mind [9], a treatise on the social and cultural
consequences of writing, these influences, as well as their
echoes in Lévi-Strauss's book, are evident.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology
at the TIK Centre (Centre
for Technology, Innovation and Culture), University of Oslo. His
books include textbooks, critical essays and academic
publications on identity politics, globalisation and cultural
complexity. His most recent books in English are Tyranny of
the Moment (Pluto, 2001) and, with Finn S. Nielsen, A
History of Anthropology (Pluto, 2001). Visit Thomas
Hylland Eriksen's web site at: http://folk.uio.no/geirthe.